I first saw it on Twitter. “Someone poke holes in this scenario,” a tweet from Eric Nelson, the editorial director of Broadside Books, read. “We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus. People get used to it. We get less vigilant as it very slowly spreads. By December we’re close to normal, but still losing 1,500 a day, and as we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren’t concerned.”
This hit me like a ton of bricks because of just how plausible it seemed. The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus. And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?
Or the people who have died of every sort of imaginable cause every single day in the history of this planet since man first became aware of his surroundings and started pondering Big Questions.TM Or the TENS OF MILLIONS of babies who have been aborted since the American "right" to that murderous abomination was invented in 1973. Or "people" like Virginia Governor Klansie McBlackface who's perfectly okay with killing kids before birth and after it. Or the thousands of elderly New Yorkers that Andrew Cuomo recently had killed.
Etc.
I've got news for you. People die every single day in this country for all kinds of reasons. And if the Chinese Flu disappeared tomorrow, people would still die every single day in this country for all kinds of reasons. So if you think that it's acceptable to pick and choose what deaths are crimes that you intend to be Gravely ConcernedTM about, your opinion is stupid and hypocritical, it doesn't interest me and it never will so keep it to yourself.
Because death really doesn't bother you at all.
6 comments:
Who's the author? (I won't click on NYT links.)
Many of those deaths were not caused by the Coronavirus, but all deaths are being recorded as such. If you've seen a meme on Facebook about hospitals "getting more money" to record deaths as Covid19, that's not accurate. What hospitals are getting is a higher percentage reimbursement from Medicare for deaths that are coded as the pandemic. So, there's no direct cash payments. I can tell you, though, most doctors, and the hospital staff that do the coding for submission to Medicare already know how to game that system. They all know just how much they can get away with.
Charlie Warzel.
Huh. Previously a tech writer for Buzz Feed. Hardly someone qualified in epidemiology, medicine, or ethics.
Yes, TLM, Medicare coding is an art form and hospitals know how to play the game. They have to, to make it financially.
Pretending that none of the COVID-coded victims would have died without this virus is foolish, of course; however, a fair number of them would have died of other causes, like flu. In fact, many may BE flu but we don't know. I'm not making light of the horror of American nursing homes and assisted living centers in this epidemic. It's just that many Americans have the idea that we're immortal, despite all the traffic accidents and drug overdoses -- and flu epidemics -- which have been taking out Americans for years.
We need to have targeted protection for nursing homes, assisted living facilities, medical facilities, and for older people in general. At 71, I'm staying close to home. There is no good reason for most people under 60 to stay home. The virus is out there, and healthy under-60s are at very little risk, not enough to justify destroying livelihoods.
Katherine, same protocols here (I'm 69). And having recently had surgery followed by a bad skin reaction to the pre-scrub and having to get lots of steroids, I'll be doing it for some time, but it's quite do-able, especially now that it's warm enough to work yard and flowerbeds and woodpile. For Cruella De Gov and others to try to make the more robust continue to stay home is just more of the same political hitjob that has been interwoven with this mess from the start.
Post a Comment